What is this blog about?

Western popular culture is saturated with science fiction. Some science fiction is presented as fiction, some as fact, and most of the time somewhere between those two extremes.

Sometimes the science part of science fiction is used to generate a different view on what society could become given different circumstances. So the science given is a literary device used to suspend belief and take the reader or viewer on an imaginary journey.

Sometime science fiction is generated by people we would call scientists, and is used deceitfully to gain honour and prestige within the scientific community and beyond.

Sometimes scientific concepts are abused to the point of nonsense by people claiming some deeper insight into the Universe.

And there are shades, genres and fashions linking all of the above.

Don’t get me wrong about this. Having been born in the middle of the Space Race and seen men walking on the Moon, I’ve seen science fiction become science fact.

Science fiction in popular culture has many forms, such as space opera like Star Trek, Star Wars, Space 1999 and Babylon 5, or supposed harder science fiction such as Armageddon, I Robot or Blade Runner.

But the hard sciences underpinned by the universal language and toolkit of mathematics are not about what is possible. They are about what is not possible.

For example, perpetual motion machines are not possible, but it hasn’t stopped lots of people trying and claiming that this or that conceptual design produces more energy than is input. Sometimes this comes out of genuine misunderstanding about scientific concepts, but more often it is by conscious fraud.

So this blog is about science and what is possible and what is not.

But that doesn’t mean that people, like the Red Queen, cannot believe six impossible things before breakfast.